Sunday, October 9, 2011

{31 Days} Stocking your Fridge & Freezer

Just like filling your pantry with essentials for cooking from scratch, it’s helpful to have a few basics in your fridge and freezer.

Fridge Essentials

In our fridge, you’ll find: milk, half & half, whipping cream, cream cheese & buttermilk. With these simple dairy staples you’ll have what you need to cook from scratch. Half & half along with whipping cream keep really well in the fridge, so we tend to buy bigger quantities since the price per oz is cheaper. We do the same thing with buttermilk – especially because you can freeze buttermilk!

If you don’t want to buy buttermilk, you can use your white vinegar + milk to make your own. We do this from time to time (in things like cake recipes, etc.), but once we started buying buttermilk to make things like pancakes, we have found the substitute just isn’t the same.

We also have white & yellow cheeses on hand at all times. For white cheeses, our staples include Parmesan, Mozzarella, and Monterrey Jack. Occasionally, we’ll splurge on something like White Cheddar. For our yellow cheeses, we have Extra Sharp Cheddar & Colby Jack.

We’ve found that by having extra sharp cheddar cheese in our kitchen we have no need to buy the less flavorful “low fat” cheeses. The extra sharp cheddar cheese adds amazing flavor and depth to our foods and we can cut down on the amount of cheese substantially when we use it in place of cheddar cheese.

Freezer Essentials

We LOVE our freezer. However, you don’t need to have a chest freezer to stock it well! For the first 4 years of our marriage, we had a small, over the fridge freezer, which we made work. You can too!

In our freezer, you’ll find a large stock of fruits & veggies. Flash freezing fresh, seasonal produce during the summer leaves us with an excellent stock for the winter. For fruits, we stock:

For the other veggies, we buy frozen from the grocery store. Our “go-to price” is $1.00/package. So, when they go on sale, we fill up our freezer.

Finally, we do have lean meat in our freezer.

I will say up front, that we are in the process of finding a local source for our meats. Presently, we have chosen a few local brands that we feel have fairly good practices – and supplement with farmer’s market purchases. When we lived in Michigan, we had a farmer that we bought our poultry & eggs from, but since moving we haven’t made that connection just yet.

3 comments:

Hello! Love reading your 31 day series...very interesting! In this post you mentioned that you freeze zucchini from your garden. Do you just wash and cut into large dices before freezing? Do you mainly use this in breads, pancakes, etc. where you bake the zucchini into the food or does frozen zucchini cook well into dishes like pasta where you leave the zucchini in bite size pieces? I wondered if it would become to mushy in a dish like this... Thanks again for your info!

Thanks for the post! It is definitely on my "to do" list for next summer to get fresh fruit/veggies and freeze it for winter. I am assuming it is much more economical PLUS you know where it came from and what you put in it. And once I get my own place I would LOVE to have a garden to grow my own produce!

For the meat...what do you look for in quality meat? I just get my meat at the grocery store...

When cooking, please make sure to follow kitchen hygiene and safety -- cook meat until internal temperature is at safe levels, always check labels for allergens, and use caution in the kitchen -- I love sharing recipes, but I am not liable for damages done as a result of trying these recipes.